News

Q: What kind of content should a local business develop?
A: The kind that converts!
Okay, you could have hit on that answer yourself, but as this post aims to demonstrate:
There are almost as many user paths to conversion as there are customers in your city, and
Your long-term goal is to become the authority in your industry and geography that consumers and search engines turn to.
Google’s widely publicized concept of micro-moments has been questioned by some local SEOs for its possible oversimplification of consumer behavior. Nevertheless, I think it serves as a good, basic model for understanding how a variety of human needs (I want to do, know, buy something, or go somewhere) leads people onto the web. When a local business manages to become a visible solution to any of these needs, the rewards can include:
Online traffic
In-store traffic
Transactions
Reviews/testimonials
Clicks-for-directions
Clicks-to-call
Clicks-to-website
Social sharing
Offline word-of-mouth
Good user metrics like time-on-page, low bounce rate, etc.
Takeaway: Consumers have a variety of needs and can bestow a variety of rewards that directly or indirectly impact local business reputation, rankings and revenue when these needs are well-met.
No surprise: it will take a variety of types of content publication to enjoy the full rewards it can bring.
Proviso: There will be nuances to the best types of content for each local business based on geo-industry and average consumer. Understandably, a cupcake bakery has a more inviting topic for photographic content than does a septic services company, but the latter shouldn’t rule out the power of an image of tree roots breaking into a septic line as a scary and effective way to convert property owners into customers. Point being, you’ll be applying your own flavor to becoming a geo-topical authority as you undertake the following content development work:
These are the basics almost every local business will need to publish.
Customer service policy
Every single staff member who interacts with your public must be given a copy of your complete customer service policy. Why? A 2016 survey by the review software company GetFiveStars demonstrated that 57% of consumer complaints revolve around customer service and employee behavior....

Imagine if your Executive Creative Director pulled you into his office and said "Hey dude, we're only interested in making creative that gets a ton of views and earned media so from now on I'm only going to start paying you if your ads register more than three million hits on social media sites and Youtube. If your ads don't make a big splash don't worry. You can still work here, it's just we won't pay you." How would you feel about that? Would you be pissed? You'd probably think "man I've given up nights and weekends to give you the best I have, and I should get paid either way." You might feel like you were punished for doing something wrong, even though you personally didn't.
Well, that's what Youtube did to its content creators today. The only difference is, the content creators have always created for free, relying on ads to make any sort of revenue.
Titled "Introducing Expanded YouTube Partner Program Safeguards to Protect Creators" Youtube has changed its perimeters. Here's an excerpt:
Starting today, we will no longer serve ads on YPP videos until the channel reaches 10k lifetime views. This new threshold gives us enough information to determine the validity of a channel. It also allows us to confirm if a channel is following our community guidelines and advertiser policies. By keeping the threshold to 10k views, we also ensure that there will be minimal impact on our aspiring creators. And, of course, any revenue earned on channels with under 10k views up until today will not be impacted.
In a few weeks, we’ll also be adding a review process for new creators who apply to be in the YouTube Partner Program. After a creator hits 10k lifetime views on their channel, we’ll review their activity against our policies. If everything looks good, we’ll bring this channel into YPP and begin serving ads against their content. Together these new thresholds will help ensure revenue only flows to creators who are playing by the rules.
If you’re a new creator who’s just started building your channel, our YouTube Creator Academy has...

Imagine you work for an e-commerce company.
Wouldn't it be useful to know the total organic sessions and conversions to all of your products? Every week?
If you have access to some analytics for an e-commerce company, try and generate that report now. Give it 5 minutes.
Done?
Or did that quick question turn out to be deceptively complicated? Did you fall into a rabbit hole of scraping and estimations?
Not being able to easily answer that question — and others like it — is costing you thousands every year.
Let’s jump back a step
Every online business, whether it’s a property portal or an e-commerce store, will likely have spent hours and hours agonizing over decisions about how their website should look, feel, and be constructed.
The biggest decision is usually this: What will we build our website with? And from there, there are hundreds of decisions, all the way down to what categories should we have on our blog?
Each of these decisions will generate future costs and opportunities, shaping how the business operates.
Somewhere in this process, a URL structure will be decided on. Hopefully it will be logical, but the context in which it’s created is different from how it ends up being used.
As a business grows, the desire for more information and better analytics grows. We hire data analysts and pay agencies thousands of dollars to go out, gather this data, and wrangle it into a useful format so that smart business decisions can be made.
It’s too late. You’ve already wasted £1000s a year.
It’s already too late; by this point, you’ve already created hours and hours of extra work for the people who have to analyze your data and thousands will be wasted.
All because no one structured the URLs with data gathering in mind.
How about an example?
Let’s go back to the problem we talked about at the start, but go through the whole story. An e-commerce company goes to an agency and asks them to get total organic sessions to all of their product pages. They want to measure performance over time.
Now this company was very diligent when they made their site. They’d read Moz...

Adland reported that global brands are finally are shunning Google advertising. In many news sources around the web, people have made their opinions heard about this development - which seems to have come as a surprise to the people who relied on the Google-machine the most for their income.
What happened is so simple to comprehend, it could be drawn out on a neat little blackboard as an ecosystem demonstration for third graders. And yet so many who make their living online refuse to understand how the system works, nor how they allowed the biggest brood parasites of the system to grow strong. Instead they're being cuckoo for Youtube views.
So many in my profession have preached to the big media companies to "go to where the audience is," to make all of their paid-for content available for free on platforms like Youtube, Flickr, et al. Over and over they preached to the established media to change everything they did, inadvertently creating many more hands holding the income-earning content. They never quite got around to explaining how the income would be earned, but they sure walked away with huge lecturing fees in their pockets. There was never a decent discussion about how income would be earned once you relinquished control of your content to Youtube (or any other platform) at the time. Advertisers and media companies just followed the false prophets with blind faith.
When photography rights owners such as museums followed this advice and uploaded their entire library to Flickr and marking it CC, they literally gave away their government-funded paycheck to a non-tax paying company in San Francisco. The mushrooming of companies that acted as little more than data sifters enabled Silicon Valley to build entire new glass aquarium areas to throw pretend money around. And all the while it was just assumed that museums would benefit from this, and newspapers and TV channels would survive from giving away their content. The “gurus,” assured them all would be fine. They had advertising income thanks to their audience and size. We all know how well that worked.
Beyond the question of revenue was...

There is nothing so useful for a leading-edge thinker as a succinct idea, stated plainly and simply, that makes your practice better. For people in marketing — and, really, for everyone else in business as well — some of the most valuable nuggets have to do with customer relationships. Customers are not always who you think they are. They don’t always want what you think they want. These two simple concepts can help.
1. Get to know your highest-volume customers. A successful marketing leader comes to know a great deal about the best, most loyal customers. These fall into one of three groups: the early adopters, the repeaters, and the heavy users. Each of these groups is different. Early adopters may not always be repeaters. And not all repeaters will become heavy users.
It’s the heavy users you should come to know best: the people who continually buy your products in high quantities. They are gold. They may be a minority — even a small minority. And market research will often miss them. But to your company, they can be worth five or even 15 times an occasional or casual customer. Listen to them. Keep them happy. Coddle them.
For a personal-care company, a heavy user might be a woman with long hair who uses three times the shampoo of a typical user. For a shaving products company, the heaviest user is a man who shaves twice a day and uses a few new blades each week. Coffee purveyors should seek out the java drinker who brews three fresh pots a day. Beer marketers need to focus on the suds fan who always buys the same brand and drinks it every day. Food companies should seek out more contact with the habitual snacker, who eats, say, the same brand of popcorn every night before the TV. It’s not just makers of consumables — theme parks and restaurants have their heavy users, too, who visit regularly.
Spend time analyzing your heavy users. Find out what they want and why your product keeps them coming back. Look for qualities that would make them even more loyal....